Visualizing Mass Shootings

Two years of interactives and data on gun killings in the US

Over the past two years or so, we’ve kept tabs on our community’s work around guns in America. We’ve seen a wealth of data visualizations and a huge breadth of interactive projects that bring clarity to stories of gun violence and mass shootings—projects often assembled quickly amid the chaos of breaking news.

After the mass killing in Las Vegas this week, we’re sharing our collection of exemplary and challenging projects as resources to comb through now, and to turn back to when the next time inevitably arrives.

This work isn’t easy for anyone who does it. We salute the many reporters, editors, designers, data nerds, and developers who do it, thoughtfully and relentlessly, in the hope of angling us toward a future with fewer next times.

The Scale of Mass Killings

Coverage of victims often operates at two (opposite) distances. It shows us up-close portraits of the lives lost. Or it shows the enormous scope of the death toll. An often-linked Washington Post interactive, The Math of Mass Shootings, does both. As we publish this piece, the Washington Post piece tracks 949 deaths in the country’s deadliest modern mass shootings, beginning with the murders of 16 people at the University of Texas in 1966. The feature represents each ended life as a human figure with a name and an age, except for those killed in Las Vegas this week—their data is still coming in.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently mapped a geospatial representation of mass shootings, based on data from Stanford University, and allows readers to filter mass shootings by the kind of guns used and by the shooter’s characteristics (age, gender, mental illness status) when known.

While many interactives count lives, others are counting guns. This one in the New York Times, How They Got Their Guns, shows the parallel timelines of very different mass shootings. And over at Bloomberg, this is what a gun sales surge looks like. From Mother Jones, here’s another deep dive into dollars: a look at the cost of gun violence to American taxpayers.

Data and Context

FiveThirtyEight collected data from the CDC, the FBI, the University of Maryland, Mother Jones, and other sources to visualize the US’s 33,000 annual gun deaths. The feature notes that the three kinds of shootings that attract the greatest media attention—mass killings, terrorist attacks, and police killings of civilians—are not representative of the true tally of gun violence in the US. Maggie Koerth-Baker wrote an accompanying article to break down the implications of the data.

At the Washington Post, Kevin Schaul put together an interactive to look at the ways differing definitions of “mass shooting” affect our understanding and representation of large-scale gun deaths in the US.

Calls to Action

An interactive editorial in the Boston Globe, Make it Stop, is one we return to again and again, and it was updated yesterday with new information on the fight for (and against) an assault weapons ban, along with running statistics on the number and death toll of mass shootings since the previous ban expired.

After a rash of copycat suicides in the early 1980s, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued voluntary guidelines for reporting on such events: Emphasize that help is possible, do not romanticize the act and do not report on details of the method. (Research shows that being able to imagine an act in specific terms makes it more likely that someone will carry out their plans.)

The media needs to adopt a similar sensible framework to covering mass killings. And in the age of social media, that also means changing our own behavior.

This doesn’t mean censoring the news or not reporting important events of obvious news value. It means not providing the killers with the infamy they seek. It means somber, instead of lurid and graphic, coverage, and a focus on victims. It means not putting the killer’s face on loop. It means minimizing or not using the killers’ names, as I have done here. It means not airing snuff films, or making them easily accessible on popular sites. It means holding back reporting of details such as the type of gun, ammunition, angle of attack and the protective gear the killer might have worn. Such detailed reporting can give the next killer a concrete road map.

How You’ve Managed It

For smaller teams looking to prep for quick turnarounds, we found a lot of practical guidance in Carla Astudillo’s Source article about creating re-useable templates that hook reporting and graphics together. She explains why, in the aftermath of the Paris shootings:

One of our breaking news reporters asked if I could create a graphic breaking down the identities of each suspect and their respective fates. It would have to be done quickly and be easily updated as news changed. If we’d had more resources on hand, this would’ve been no big deal. However, I could get it done quickly that day, or I could make it able to be easily updated in our content management system. I couldn’t do both.

We’re Listening

The last few years have produced far more features on mass shootings and gun violence than we can include here. We are, now and always, interested in hearing from you—about interactives or features you found especially compelling, about your experiences negotiating the ethical and logistical tensions intrinsic in coverage of mass killings, or anything else about this work that you’d like to talk about. Send us a note: source@opennews.org.

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OpenNews connects a network of developers, designers, journalists, and editors to collaborate on open technologies and processes within journalism. OpenNews believes that a community of peers working, learning, and solving problems together can create a stronger, more responsive journalism ecosystem. Incubated at the Mozilla Foundation from 2011-2016, OpenNews is now a project of Community Partners.